The woman at the front table of the parish hall of St. Michael in Pittsburgh was holding my check for five thousand dollars, wearing my reading glasses, and carrying my brown leather purse on her arm, and she looked straight at me with the calm face of a stranger. I am Dorothy Kowalski, eighty one years old, and I stood in the aisle between the long folding tables with my bingo dauber in my hand and three hundred neighbors staring. “Poor thing,” the woman said gently to the caller. “She gets confused. Her son is on his way to take her home.”
I did not shout. I have played bingo at St. Michael every Thursday for forty four years, and I know every face in that hall, from the ushers at the door to the ladies who sell pierogi in the kitchen. What I saw was that nobody believed the woman. They glanced at her, then at me, then at the doors. Mrs. Wozniak, who sat beside me with her rosary in her lap, squeezed my wrist under the table and whispered, “Dorothy, we are with you. Say nothing until your boy arrives and shows his hand.”
Then the side door opened, and my son Mark came in with his good coat unbuttoned and a tight smile on his face. He is fifty two years old, a salesman of insurance in Cranberry Township, and he has worried me since he was twelve. He walked down the center aisle without looking at me once. He went straight to the woman at the front table, and he put his arm around her shoulders, like a man greeting his wife. Three hundred people drew in their breath at the same moment.
A winning bingo card read aloud gave one grandmother the length of a Thursday night to bring her son back to the truth in Pittsburgh.
I gave my terms from where I stood, loud enough for every table to hear, in the voice I once used on a classroom of thirty second graders. “Mark, you will take your arm off that woman. You will return my purse, my glasses and my check to me, here, in front of these people. Then you will tell Father Dombrowski and this entire hall who she is, and why there is a driver license in her pocket with my name on it. I saw it slip out of my purse a minute ago.”
The smile fell off the face of my son, and he let his arm drop. “Mama, her name is Renee,” he said, so quietly that Mrs. Wozniak leaned forward to hear. “She is my friend. I owe eighty thousand dollars to a man in Monroeville after I put money into a bad investment. I was going to have you declared unable to manage your own affairs, take charge of the house on Carson Street, and sell it. Renee has been practicing how to be you for a month.” The hall began to hum like a beehive.
But Renee had no wish to be named in front of three hundred witnesses. In one swift motion she snatched the check from the table and the small blue folder of forged papers from under her arm, the proof of the whole scheme, and she ran for the side door in her good shoes, with Mark stumbling after her, meaning to be in the parking lot before anyone understood. She shoved past the pierogi table. Two ushers stepped into the aisle. The caller dropped her microphone. And Father Dombrowski, a big man, closed the side door with his back.
Renee stopped in the doorway with the check crushed in her fist and the forged folder under her arm, the priest in front of her and the ushers closing in on both sides, the fluorescent lights buzzing above and the numbered balls rattling to a stop in the cage behind. Father Dombrowski spoke in his gentle pulpit voice. “Young woman, I have known Dorothy since I was a seminarian. I believe you should sit down in that chair and wait for the police.” Renee looked at three hundred faces. She dropped the check onto the floor, and she sat.
The consequences were swift and sad. Renee was charged with forgery and attempted fraud, and she cooperated with the prosecutors and named the man in Monroeville, who was arrested the same month. Mark was spared a prison term because I asked the judge for mercy, but he was ordered to repay everything, to attend classes for gamblers and investors, and to work a second job at a warehouse. He sold his own car. He moved into my spare room, paid rent, and learned how to fold the bingo cards for the Thursday sessions.
In the name of my husband Walter, who passed in 2016, I started the Walter Kowalski Fund. It pays for legal help for older people tricked by family members or strangers, and for repairs to church halls and senior centers where neighbors gather, in Allegheny, Beaver and Westmoreland counties. In the first year we helped one hundred and four families and repaired nine parish halls. One was an eighty six year old widow from Beaver Falls who held her recovered pension check in both hands and told the volunteers she had thought nobody would ever believe her.
On the first Thursday of November, I sat at my usual table in the parish hall, in my own glasses, with my brown purse on my lap and Mark beside me carefully folding cards for the early session. The caller drew the numbers one by one, and the whole room hushed. When I shouted bingo on the last blackout game, Mark jumped to his feet, laughing, and kissed me on the forehead before everyone. “Mama,” he said, “I am so glad you are my mother.” I patted his hand and told him to sit down and mind his cards, because the next game was about to begin and I did not intend to lose it.
